Articles from Vol. 17, No. 1, May 31

In the conclusion to her 1986 article entitled "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," Joan Scott claims that:This new history will leave open possibilities for thinking about current feminist political strategies and the (utopian) future;...

Blacks in the public sphere is a broad and awkward subject but it is not a new theme. Blacks live in a goldfish bowl, which means that even the most private aspects of our lives are examined and kicked around in the public sphere.The reasons why this...

The dominant currents in bourgeois culture place great value upon individual human experience, achievement and expression. The privileging of individual identity has its origins in Christian orthodoxy, capitalist ideology and nineteenth century Romanticism....

In Australia during the 1970s and 1980s there has been a growing demand for care provisions for young children outside their own homes. This demand has been prompted not least by the increasing numbers of women entering the workforce; by the increasing...

The study of writing by Australian women has become a major activity for Australian literary critics over the past ten years and a great deal has been achieved in the way of finding, reprinting, reading and discussing the work of women writers whose...

It may seem as if issues of theory would not impinge much on the biography of Miles Franklin: that this must be the story of a cultural nationalist par excellence, with not much deviation from the `mainstream' much less the `intersections and conflict'...

IntroductionThis paper is based on a chapter in an ARC Monograph which is edited by Professor Millicent Poole, titled Education and Work and currently in press. The chapter itself was based on ethnographic research which describes the culture of a Queensland...

The relationship between culture and history, between text and experience, is of particular concern for feminists as a way of making meaning about the role of gender in cultural construction. Feminist cultural historians focus on the specificity of women's...

This issue of Hecate publishes the papers of the Women/Australia/Theory Conference on 14-16 July 1990, organised by myself and Bronwen Levy (with a little help from our friends), and sponsored by the Australian Studies Centre and the English Department...

This paper is based on my experience of life (hi)story work with Aboriginal women. It will focus mainly on the development of a collaborative methodology between Patsy Cohen and myself and the process of creating the text Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs...

The idea for the title of this discussion paper comes from that of a recent British account of women's writing: Into the Mainstream. How Feminism Has Changed Women's Writing, by Nicci Gerrard. A literary journalist and co-editor of the now deceased feminist...

The question which currently haunts my own work is: who speaks for whom about what?About a year ago I was in England where being Australian meant `foreign' and I was also at a conference on Commonwealth Literature where the dominant terms were `post-colonisation'...

What does `feminism' mean now? Does it mean something rather different to the `women's liberation' we talked about in the 1960s and early 1970s and, if so, why?Hardly anyone talks about women's liberation any more, was the title of a review I wrote in...

Beverley Farmer in her recent work A Body of Water sums up Olga Masters in this way: "No-one is like her: sly, garrulous, fussy with that glow of sensuality and an alertness. Carving a family life to the bare bone like a Sunday joint" (158). Farmer manages...

Historians of sexuality have emphasised the process, through the dosing decades of the nineteenth century, of the policing of the morals and public behaviour of young working class youth. Most have noted that females, in particular, came in for special...

IntroductionEliza Fraser was the first white woman to encounter Aborigines on the present continent of Australia and to tell her tale. Her narratives, embellished by nineteenth century myths of white racial superiority, and of native savagery and cannibalism,...

I want to begin this paper by wondering aloud whether feminist theory might take note of the relatively new chaos theory, popularized by James Gleick in his bestselling Chaos: Making a New Science (1988). Chaos theory is the name given to recant developments...

Where does a paper on gossip come from? The topic of gossip has emerged from our various work teaching women's writing and teaching about melodrama and soap operas, in both of which gossip features routinely as theme, as narrative device, as character,...

IntroductionIn this paper I seek to investigate the practice of bestiality. This study of bestiality forms part of a larger project on "Sexual Offences and Policing in Queensland, 1870-1949," in which I examine the history of male sexuality. This study...

This paper is the synthesis of a rather longer written paper and the more colloquial, shorter version presented in the final session of the conference, "Bringing it Together." Given the range of issues covered by the earlier speakers it would have been...

Feminist history began in Australia in 1970 when Ann Curthoys published her `germinal article,' "Australian Historiography and Women's liberation," in which she noted the failure of the nationalist historiographical tradition to consider the historical...

In attempting to provide an analysis of writing my Mother's life, it is necessary firstly to elucidate the vital role oral history plays in the recording of Aboriginal stories and how it has changed over the years. Oral history is a specific method of...